Monthly Archives: September 2007

I’m taking my camera down to the local Armed Forces recruiting station station today, with the intention of interviewing some of what promises to be hundreds of not thousands of new volunteers for spreading freedom throughout the world. Oh, what a call to duty! There are thousands of people marching and protesting in Myanmar, and being met with gunfire and arrest. From today’s article:

“Thursday was the most violent day in more than a month of protests — which at their height have brought an estimated 70,000 demonstrators to the streets. Bloody sandals lay scattered on some streets as protesters fled shouting “Give us freedom, give us freedom!”

C’mon, all you beautiful purple-fingered freedom lovers! It will be difficult to find more blatant oppression than this. It doesn’t get much clearer, fellas. Put that lucrative career on hold for a little while, enlist, train, and start spreading a little of that freedom. Man up. We got guys hunkered down in Iraq and Afghanistan at the moment, or I’m sure they would be happy to take care of this little hotspot for ya. How bout picking up the slack for these guys a little? Oh, you’re busy? Never mind.

Sigh. Chris Matthews just finished referencing an article he found in The New Republic (which I have been unable to find, possessing a weak Google-fu and all) that essentially makes the point that pro-war conservatives do not encourage their children to serve in Iraq. He read it like it was the first time anyone ever thought to make that point. Has he never heard of Operation Yellow Elephant? Or read any Liberal columnists or bloggers? Good Lord, man, many of us have believed from the jump that if this war is truly about protecting this country from terror, and preserving our whole way of life, why aren’t they pushing their children to go? Or, better, going themselves?

Have you ever met anyone that personifies an aphorism? Loyal readers of Tiny Cat Pants will understand when I say that this lovely woman from Los Angeles had to be the inspiration for the saying “ask her what time it is, she’ll tell you how to build a watch.” At least, thats the online Magniloquence. In person, she communicates with a combination of throaty grunts and spastic hand gestures that are marginally entertaining. Shy. Wow. I’m not certain she has gotten over the miracle of the electric telephone, or she is afraid they charge by the word. A definite dichotomy. Here she is, with her hippie weirdo snake handling boy-toy Tim. He is a heretic. My kids liked them anyway.

That seems a rather apt description, too. Raging tantrums, messy attempts at eating, stumbling about, since we don’t quite have total control of our faculties, all of which we overlook and forgive because, well, dammit, they are just so unbearably CUTE.

Tiny Cat Pants is three years old today, readers. I started babysitting over there around two years ago. Aunt B made me laugh, cry, think and rage. Reading her made me aware that I am indeed an oppressor, a staunch defender of the Patriarchal status quo, an enemy to be feared and plotted against, but still loved by her nonetheless.

What I admire most about TCP is that Aunt B is incredibly transparent. The reader seldom if ever has to guess what B’s agenda is, and she lets us in on the most mundane aspects of her existence, but in a way that really makes us care.

Another reason I love her blog so much is the quality of the people who join in her discussions. Loyal readers from everywhere make every thread interesting.

When he enters the territory of which Eutropia is the capital, the traveler sees not one city but many, of equal size and not unlike one another, scattered over a vast, rolling plateau. Eutropia is not one, but all these cities together; only one is inhabited at a time, the others are empty; and this process is carried out in rotation. Now I shall tell you how. On the day when Eutropia’s inhabitants feel the grip of weariness, and no one can bear any longer his job, his relatives, his house and his life, debts, and the people he must greet or that greet him, then the whole citizenry decides to move to the next city, which is there waiting for them, empty and good as new; there each will take up a new job, a different wife, will see another landscape upon opening his window, and will spend his time with different pastimes, friends, gossip. So their life is renewed from move to move, among cities whose exposure or declivity or streams or winds make each site somehow different from the others. Since their society is ordered without great distinctions of wealth or authority, the passage from one function to another takes place almost without jolts; variety is guaranteed by the multiple assignments, so that in a span of a lifetime, a man rarely returns to a job that was formerly his.

Thus the city repeats it’s life, identical, shifting up and down on it’s empty chessboard. The inhabitants repeat the same scenes, with the actors changed; they repeat the same speeches with variously combined accents, they open alternative mouths in identical yawns. Alone, among all the cities of the empire, Eutropia remains always the same. Mercury, god of the fickle, to whom the city is sacred, worked this ambiguous miracle.

Italo Calvino, “Invisible Cities.”

Isn’t it a little scary to read something that describes your whole life?